Cvent Survey

I was recently reading a post over at the Datasets blog about how not to write a survey. While I've sited political surveys as a good source to find bad example survey questions, Bret Goble points out that using leading questions in a survey could also hurt your response rate. In the back of my mind, I always knew this was true, but never put it into words.


People who don't agree with you are more likely to throw out your paper survey or delete the email survey invitation for your online questionnaire. Makes perfect sense, right? You're clearly not interested in their opinion since you didn't take the time to disguise your own bias, why should a respondent waste their time completing your survey?

If you want to make your findings invalid and gather fewer responses that limit any statistical significance in you survey research findings, follow this one easy step: Ask blatantly obvious leading questions. The responses you do get are almost guaranteed to be worthless, but they'll definitely agree with you.